A study published in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health has found that the frequent use of social media may harm girls' mental health by increasing their exposure to bullying and reducing their sleep and physical exercise. The research involved interviews with almost 10,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16 in England. Study co-author Russell Viner of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health said, “Our results suggest that social media itself doesn't cause harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that have a positive impact on mental health such as sleeping and exercising, while increasing exposure of young people to harmful content, particularly the negative experience of cyber-bullying.”
It means, while social media itself may not be to blame for mental health issues, it rather takes away from girls' sleep quality and exercise while exposing users to cyberbullying and that's what leads to lower well-being and problems with mental health. Lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Surrey, Bob Patton said this means strategies focusing only on reducing social media use as a tool to improve well-being or mental health might not help.
In a statement, he said, “Building strategies to increase resilience to cyberbullying and that promote better sleep and exercise behaviours may well be what is needed to reduce both physical and psychological harm.” The research was conducted by interviewing teenagers once a year from 2013 to 2015. They would report the frequency with which they checked or used social media, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Snapchat. Any more than three times in a day was considered “very frequent”.
Researchers found that very frequent social media use in both sexes, was associated with greater psychological distress. The effect was especially clear among girls. The more often they checked social media, the greater their psychological distress.
